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Poetry has become the soft tissue of connection between people who would otherwise never have met, never exchanged the deepest of feelings and thoughts, never have become good friends. It is ironic, given the accolades social media attracts, that poetry is the best short cut to getting to know other people. It doesn’t take many poems about love, loss, aloneness, God and no God for a poet’s heart and mind to be exposed and responded to. It brings intimacy where there was inordinate privacy, community where there was just a passing of strangers.
Poetry and its sharing gives a ‘place’ to those of us who have none and understanding of a ‘place’ to those who can identify with such a notion. It creates a space between the earnest and the imaginary, the entering of which, as Seamus Heaney offers, fills us ‘with a momentary sense of freedom and wholeness, ’ allowing us to ‘transform the familiar into something rich and strange.’
The Intimacy of Strangers together with weekly poetry workshops and monthly readings is a brilliant case study in how the North Shore Poetry Project has used reading, writing and listening to poetry to break the back of what has become an epidemic of suburban aloneness. It is not only a wonderful collection of poetry, but a textbook for anyone interested in bringing people together in a supportive and meaningful way.
Contributors:
John Upton, Rosemary Huisman, Col Grant, Tricia Dearborn, Andy Kissane, Charles Murray, Sarnie Hay, Alison Gorman, Eileen Chong, Kevin Hart, Philip Porter, Frances Roberts, Henrietta Metcalf, Richard James Allen, Thomas Thorpe, Helen Bersten, Benjamin Dodds, Robyn Rowland, Erina Booker, Pam Morris, Stephen Mason, Alex Skovron, Kit Kelen, Mickey Millner, Julie Fredericks, Gary McCartney, Iggy McGovern, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, Dawn Bruce, Geoff Cartwright, Marilyn Humbert, John Carey and David Malouf.
